Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance

Bioware’s Ray Muzyka says “One of the most common things we’re already hearing is that people seem to find it hard to go back to other MMOs once they play The Old Republic”. Impressive, but why? Did he continue “… because our beta client uninstalls any other MMO on their hard drive, muahahahaha!”? Or “… because they can’t remember the 34 character passwords for the other games they’ve had to change for the third time in the last two weeks thanks to new security concerns.”? Some terrible cynic (not us, obviously) might think “… because they’re almost completely burned out on the genre and the last gentle glowing ember that briefly flickered into life, kindled by SWTOR, guttered out after the third ‘kill ten womp rats’ quest.”

The juicy soundbite is extracted from a wider interview and sounds a bit arrogant on its own, especially as he says earlier “One of our core values, as an organisation, is humility”. In context he’s talking about that fourth pillar, the story in The Old Republic, and how it adds a greater sense of depth and purpose; the quote continues “… there’s a real sense of purpose to everything”. I’d agree that MMOGs can imbue numbers with more significance than single player games, though I’m still a little sceptical as to how a truly massive game can maintain the focus on one player; it’ll be interesting to find out how SWTOR does it.

1. Claiming humlity as a core tenent for your designers at the same time you gloat about people wanting to play new shiny over old and busted is somewhat disingenuous.

2. I’ve alluded to this, but hey, guess what? The reason people don’t want to play other MMOs after playing a little of the new beta? It’s because it’s new. As Helistar stated, every MMO has a bloom and sag period. Not even WoW was immune to this following launch, or a new expansion, as it has consistently bled folks at the 3-6 month mark following a launch. It happens to everyone and TOR is not likely to set a new precedent here.